ey two were in a kind of intermediate state, between earth and
Heaven, the world far away, floating in a Nirvana dream of stirless and
peaceful rest.

Not a word had escaped Mona as to that ghastly midnight struggle. The
discovery of Lambert, and his fate seemed to leave not the faintest
trace in her mind. If not wholly unconscious at the time, the incident
must have seemed to her as nothing but an illusive dream. She did not
even speculate as to how she had been placed upon this bit of wreckage
which was supporting her, supporting them both, thus providentially.

So the day went by--the long, glaring, blinding day--and floating there
these two waifs lay and talked--talked of strange things unseen, of the
Present and of love; and in the midst of the vast immeasurable solitude
heart opened to heart with well-nigh the unearthly voicing of the
spirit-land. Again the sun dipped his red run to the lip of the liquid
world, and plunged out of sight in a bathing flood of glory.

"I have never known what happiness meant until this day. I tell you, my
Mona, although there is nothing but a plank or two between ourselves and
death, speaking selfishly, I have no wish to be rescued, no wish for
further life. I have done with life and its illusions. For your sake I
trust that help may come, for my own it is the last thing I desire."

"Darling, I don't want to live without you. But think--think what life
will mean to us together. Do not say, then, that you have no wish for
rescue."

"I have thought--and a presentiment has been upon me for some time.
Hope and trust in me are dead. I said it was with life and its
illusions I had done, for the two are convertible terms. I have had a
strange foreshadowing of what has happened, and that it would be for the
best. Love--my love--so strangely, so miraculously recovered, when I
looked upon you for the last time on that day it was with the flash of a
sure and certain conviction that I should behold you again--how and
where I knew not; only that it would be at the hour of death, in some
sort of magnetic extra-natural way as that in which I beheld you before
in my dream, there in the burning house."

Solemnly, unimpassionedly the words were uttered, and the voice was that
of a man who has done with life, and is glad that it should be so. A
sob shook Mona's frame, and her tears rained down, mingling with the
oily smoothness of the tropical sea. She clasped him wildly to her in a